Fifteen years and nothing has changed

Sometimes, as a mother of a 13-year-old child, I feel out of touch with mothers of newborns. It’s not that I don’t recall the lost sleep, the crying and the angst of having a brand new baby, it’s just that so much has changed. Or at least I’d like to think it has – I’d like to think that some of the attitudes about parenting, pregnancy and child care in the workplace have changed to be more progressive and forward thinking.

But. according to the recently released report, Supporting Working Parents: Pregnancy and Return to Work National Review from the Australian Human Rights Commission, it appears that I might be wrong.

Fifteen years after the Human Rights Commission conducted the first inquiry into discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace, the evidence is that little has changed. Almost 50 percent of mothers have experienced discrimination at some point during pregnancy, parental leave or when they returned to work. And it’s not just a matter of feeling like they’ve been badly treated, 84 percent of women reported mental and physical stress and damage to their finances and career as a consequence. 22 percent of women who had suffered discrimination opted out of the workplace entirely.

Horror stories

There is some pretty heinous evidence given in the report – in one workplace an employer suggested to a woman she have an abortion, in another, a woman told her manager that she was pregnant, his immediate response was “well, your choice; the job or the baby” and because she desperately needed the job she had a termination and then she lost her job several weeks later.

A general manager with a top 50 company was told she could no longer have a senior role if she wanted a family. Her female manager told her to decide what she wanted – a family or a senior role in the company. “You can’t have both,” she was told, “ it’s a myth you can have both.”

Another woman was called ‘‘placenta brain’’ by her male colleagues and another was told she was a ‘‘bad mother and a bad employee’’ for trying to work while raising a family. Men were not left out of the parental discrimination with a request for paternity leave met with derision, the boss saying: ‘‘That’s for the mum.’’

Data shows that while discrimination occurs from the factory floor right through to senior management, it is more prevalent in male-dominated industries and is more likely to occur in larger companies than in smaller businesses.

“Do you think she’s going to leave and have babies?”

What I found most astounding was the feedback I received from people I know in business. People who I take to be forward thinking and progressive. “From an employer’s perspective it’s hard not to discriminate against pregnant women”, said a friend of mine. He explained that as a business owner he has to take into account the needs of the business. He firmly believes (and he was not alone) that it is inefficient and costly to train a new staff member during maternity leave and then help the returning mother to get up to speed after a year out of the workplace. He begrudgingly added that he knew that once she came back from maternity leave she would be taking more days off and her life would be split between work and baby.

Having a baby can make you a better or at least more experienced employee; many mums have a more mature attitude in the way they deal with things, they’re able to prioritise and handling crises is second nature to them. But more than one person I spoke to told me that if two people applied for a job and one was a newlywed woman in her late twenties and the other was a man of the same age they would employ the man. The idea that the woman might be a brilliant person for the job doesn’t really come into the equation, nor the fact that she might not decide to have children until her late thirties if it all. “It’s too risky,” they all agreed.

Who works and who cares for the kids?

Sex discrimination officer Elizabeth Broderick says this kind of behavior happens because there is a gap between what the law says and how it is implemented. The other reason is that we still live in a country where there are strong social norms about who works and who cares for the kids. It is almost always assumed the woman will be leaving work to look after the baby, the man meanwhile steps up as a “family man”, he is regarded as stable and competent now that he has settled down with a family (as long as he doesn’t ask for leave to actually spend time with his child).

It seems that nothing much has really changed at all. Maybe it’s time we stopped succumbing to the stereotype and start working on the facts – women can be an important part of the workforce and dads can be the primary caregivers and vice versa and every combination in between.